Don’t buy a universal remote, make one. It’s cheaper, funner, universal-er, kind of, and you get to learn the ESP8266, kind of.
You will need the Arduino IDE with whatever OS. Alternatively Linux and some C skills for the official Espressif stuff, but that’s unnecessarily challenging for this application.
To get IR control codes connect an IR Receiver to my Arduino UNO and use Ken Shirriff’s tools. The IRrecord demo does great with this.
https://github.com/z3t0/Arduino-IRremote
https://github.com/adafruit/Raw-IR-decoder-for-Arduino
The server code that runs the ESP uses a file system. This makes updating and otherwise modifying your HTML a breeze.
You can access the ESP server through its IP on your home wifi.
1 Comment
Tomi Engdahl says:
Control The Air Conditioning With Slack
http://hackaday.com/2017/08/23/control-the-air-conditioning-with-slack/
[Raphael Baron] needed a better way to control his office’s air conditioning units. Sure, they have remotes, but that’s too easy. [Raphael] came up with a solution that uses an ESP8266, a computer, IR LEDs, and a bot that runs on Slack.
[Raphael] built a prototype of the ESP8266 hardware on protoboard and used it to read and record the IR signals from the remote. Once he’d figured out the issues he was having with the IR library he was using, he could use it to send the IR commands to the AC unit. Since their office has two AC units, [Raphael] built a second prototype which had two IR LEDs but didn’t have the IR receiver. Using this he could turn both AC units on and off and set their temperatures.
For the server, [Raphael] turned to Clojure, a dialect of Lisp, which provides easy access to the Java Framework, mainly to get practice working with the language. The server’s main responsibility is to use Slack’s real-time API to listen for messages from a Slack bot and forward them to the ESP. In this way, a user talking to the Slack bot can send it messages which the server forwards to the microcontroller which, in turn, parses the messages and send IR commands to the AC units.
A Slack bot for controlling the office’s AC
http://rbaron.net/blog/2017/08/05/A-Slack-bot-for-controlling-the-offices-ac.html
In this post, I’ll try and talk about the building process of a system for controlling two of our office’s Air Conditioner units via Slack. It turned out to be really fun to build and, differently from virtually my side projects, surprisingly useful! This will be an overview of some of the interesting things that came up during the project. Please feel free to send me an email if you have any questions or suggestions.
This was a really fun project to work with and I definitely learned a lot from it. Tinkering with hardware and getting just a little analog feels almost a little therapeutic! While most of it is pretty hackish (specially the electronics), the second prototype has been running for a little over a month and seems to have survived through lack of internet, hard resets and many suspicious stares.